Eighth Mid-Hudson Undergraduate Philosophy Conference

The Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Marist College will host the Eighth Mid-Hudson Valley Undergraduate Philosophy Conference 27-28 October 2017. Undergraduates are encouraged to submit papers on any topic in philosophy. The conference is selective, accepting at most six papers. There are no concurrent presentations. Each paper presentation includes comments from another undergraduate from either Marist College or another one of the colleges in the Mid-Hudson Valley Region of Upstate New York.

Papers accepted for presentation are eligible for consideration for publication in the fifth volume of the annual Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal.

The keynote speaker this year will be Manuel Vargas, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. Professor Vargas specializes in Moral Psychology, Philosophy of Agency, and Latin American Philosophy. He is the author of Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibilty (Oxford University Press, 2013), for which he was awarded the Book Prize from the American Philosophical Association in 2015. He is also one of the contributing authors to Four Views on Free Will (Blackwell 2007) and co-editor with Gideon Yaffe of Rational Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman (Oxford University Press 2014). Professor Vargas has authored numerous book chapters and journal articles on topics in all of his research areas. Among his published articles is his 2005 paper, "Eurocentrism and the Philosophy of Liberation," which appeared in the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues and for which he was awarded the first American Philosophical Association Prize in Latin American Thought.